African Agriculture and Food Systems
A career scientist’s 12-year journey to give Kenya’s most popular potato variety a fighting chance against its deadliest enemy Kilimokwanza.org TIGONI, Limuru — In the cool highlands of Kiambu County, where potato plants stretch across terraced slopes like green quilts, Dr. Moses Nyongesa stands in a confined field trial plot that could reshape the future […]
What started as a southern pilot is now a four-corridor national framework. The FY 2026/2027 Hotuba confirms what AGCOT stakeholders have been working toward for two years — and signals where the next wave of agricultural investment will land. Tanzania’s Agriculture Growth Corridor framework has crossed a structural threshold. In the FY 2025/2026 reporting year, […]
In June 2025, Kenya cut its agriculture sector budget. So did Uganda. Ethiopia’s allocation has remained flat at roughly 0.3% of GDP for years. None of the East African Community’s seven mainland economies are anywhere near the 10% benchmark that African heads of state recommitted to a decade ago in Malabo. And then, in April […]
April 2026 In the highland slopes of Rungwe, where mist still clings to the volcanic ridges at sunrise and orchards roll deep into the valleys, a quiet transformation is underway. The avocado—once a backyard fruit traded informally between neighbours—has become one of Tanzania’s most strategically important agricultural commodities. It is a foreign-exchange earner, a rural […]
How AGCOT’s Corridor Development Framework Positions Tanzania as a Regional Agricultural Transformation Hub Tanzania has a $1 trillion aspiration and 25 years to realise it. At the heart of that ambition lies agriculture-a sector that feeds 61 per cent of the nation’s workforce, anchors food security for over 60 million people, and accounts for 25.9 […]
WORLD AGRICULTURE FORUM | EARTH DAY SPECIAL REPORT The Dirt Beneath Our Feet Is Running Out of Time: A landmark global forum convened on Earth Day brought together soil scientists, agronomists and policy experts to deliver a stark verdict: the world’s agricultural soils are critically degraded, the green revolution’s hidden costs are coming due, and […]
Supporting Tanzania’s Agriculture Master Plan 2050 What Is This Compact? The Morogoro–Iringa Land Health Compact is a formal, multi-stakeholder agreement to coordinate action on land health, soil security and agricultural resilience across two of Tanzania’s most productive farming regions. Signed on 23 April 2026 and convened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) […]
A landmark legal guide published in 2016 set the foundation for sweeping reforms in Tanzania’s seed sector. From corporate licensing to farmer variety recognition, the framework has evolved far beyond its original architects’ expectations. Kilimokwanza.org — Dar es Salaam In April 2016, when a consortium of international development partners published “A Legal Guide to Strengthen […]
When the farmer behind the “300 kilos per tree” claim invites you into his orchard, the grass on the ground turns out to be the teacher. By Kilimokwanza Correspondent When Beno Mgaya tells Tanzanians that a single, well-fed avocado tree can yield as much as 300 kilos in a harvest, many listeners reach for their […]
It began with a cardboard box, a Finnish potato enthusiast, and a small Tanzanian company knocking on cold doors in the Netherlands. A decade on, Tanzanian avocados are the backbone of India’s fastest-growing fresh-fruit import trade. This is the story of how a corridor, three institutions and a generation of smallholder farmers built an empire […]